Dark Souls III

Dark Souls is one of if not my favorite video game franchise of all time. I love everything about them, the interconnected worlds have so many secrets and shortcuts to find which in turn encourage exploration, they're large enough to not feel linear but still be packed with variety from one area to the next, the visually oriented show don't tell approach to storytelling, and the memorable boss fights that evoke such a huge feeling of satisfaction when they're defeated. With that said, I can say with confidence that the third entry is by far the best. It's quite the hot take, but I think the first game is a bit overrated. Don't get me wrong I think it's a good game, and I have a lot of respect for it for pushing difficult games back into the mainstream and launching one of my favorite game series, but It's just not as polished as the current gen entries. The combat was kinda slow and clunky, the game looked and ran like a PS2 game with constant framerate dips and muddy textures, and whereas the newer entries are difficult but fair Dark Souls resides in a grey area between challenging but fair and complete horse shit because of a lack of bonfires which led to a lot of backtracking, boss areas were really claustrophobic, the camera always bugged out, and certain areas were just straight up unfair and left much to be desired in terms of design like The Tomb of Giants, Sen's Fortress, and the infamous Blighttown. Dark Souls III fixes all that and improves the formula to perfection. Combat is much more fluid and fast-paced, the jump to next-gen and the higher budget have made the already beautiful and evocative settings from previous titles such as Anor Londo even more mesmerizing, bonfires are much more frequent which cuts down on backtracking but not so frequent that the game loses its sense of urgency. Boss fights are vastly superior to those found in the first game because they're memorable for good reasons not bad and are tied with Bloodborne as the best in the series. They have multiple phases to spice things up and are usually fought in large empty rooms instead of cramped spaces. Dark Souls III doesn't completely reinvent the Souls formula rather it improves it to the best it can be and it is one of my favorite games of all time.